[R-sig-ME] Nested model variance/parameter value

[N o s t a l g i a]

Karl,

Thanks for pointing out my mistakes. Yes,I should have chosen model1 
with the least AIC among the three, and I should not have compared the 
three with different dataset to start with.

I went back the original dataset and deleted all the cases that 
includes NAs manually (somehow "na.action = na.exclude, data = third2" 
did not work). Now anova() works fine, and the best model turned out 
to be (anova-wise as well asa AIC-wise) the one with only ID as the 
random variable. Everything seems fine -- except that the variace for 
intv remained zero in the model that incorporates both intv and ID as 
a random variable.  This probably I need to accept as it is: there is 
absolutely no interviewer effect.

Thanks again,

- Ken


On 2021/12/11 19:55, Karl Ove Hufthammer wrote:
> N o s t a l g i a skreiv 10.12.2021 12:29:
>> Since I got an error message saying "models were not all fitted to 
>> the same size of dataset" while running anova(), I compared the AICs 
>> and concluded that model2 is the best model of the three.
> 
> No, model 2 has the *highest* AIC, and based on AIC, it would be the 
> *worst* model. The best model would be the one with the lowest AIC. 
> (Also, it doesn’t seem realistic to assume no random effect for the 
> interviewees, so I would also dismiss model 2 based on *theoretical* 
> grounds.)
> 
> But in this case, comparing the AICs (or log likelihood) is actually 
> *not* valid, as the data were not fitted to the same dataset 
> (something which anova() warns you about). In model 3, you have 3294 
> observations, but in model 1 and 2, you only have 3283 observations. 
> The only difference between the models is that model 3 doesn’t include 
> the ‘intv’ variable. In other words, for 11 responses, you don’t know 
> who the interviewer was.
> 
> So you have to refit the models to the *same* dataset, e.g., by 
> removing the observation where ‘is.na(intv)’ before fitting the models.
> 
>